I guess the fact he was carrying the ball for a lunatic quarterback might have had something to do with it too.

Now, silence. Did they all follow Gault’s plaintive whistling to a secret valley to let the world fall apart? Because they put in power just the right folks to accomplish that.

(As moderator, I know that we shouldn’t discuss politics on the community board, but I’m considering going on strike until the shutdown is over. Someone tell Lindy she can post Crop Circle Crap on the Space Board if she wants. Flame away, y’all.)

Un-reported are the experiments or projects that are, like you wrote, dependent on constant attention or scheduling deadlines. The cost of the lost time is beyond calculation.

But I don’t expect you’ll get any sympathy from Conservatives in general, or Trump partisans in particular. They embrace this view that government workers are lazy, overpaid drones and bureaucrats who contribute nothing to the society, (after all, they are neither entrepreneurs nor do they work for one) and they are delighted that their Fuhrer’s policies are causing them severe hardships. Maybe they don’t come out publicly and say it, but I’m sure you know what they’re thinking.

Remember in the good old days on the Zone how some of our Randian space groupies used to bad-mouth NASA? Supposedly, government space programs were designed to hamstring and obstruct space capitalists, who would immediately take us to the stars once the government bureaucrats were removed from the picture. The same attitude was, and still is, applied to those who administer all the programs and agencies whose job it is to protect the consumer, the environment and the worker
from the greed of the private sector.

I have a feeling those Trumpers and wingnuts who work for the government are about to get an epiphany of their own. And there are all those other workers who may work for private industry, but who will suddenly find they are unexpectedly affected by the ramifications and unanticipated consequences of the Border Wall Extortion.

Getting a second job isn’t likely an option for me – who would hire someone when you know they will leave the moment the shutdown ends? Consulting companies that work in my area of expertise isn’t an option for me either since that would lead to all sorts of ethics violations and conflicts of interest… (Not that ethics really matters to this administration)….

I might try my hand at 3d-modeling for pay – logo animations etc…

Technically, its against the law for us to work on our official jobs during a shutdown, but I suspect 90% of the science staff are ignoring that legality to some extent.